Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

Sunrise showed them sparsely wooded canal banks providing ideal ambush territory, and the local brigands were predictable enough to take advantage of it. The first arrow whipping from between the trees actually fell short, a remarkably poor shot for a Commonwealer, but soon there were plenty of other shafts in the air. Skelling’s crew and passengers crouched behind the pavises, waiting for a more personal introduction to their assailants. Che had the impression that these wooden shields were Skelling’s own innovation, rather than standard fittings aboard Commonweal barges.

– dark stone halls, and only a guttering lamp to guide her – Che blinked and shook her head uncertainly. The sun was bright in the east behind them, and the sporadic thud-thud-thud of arrows into wood had slowed as their assailants evidently realized they were simply wasting ammunition. Everyone around her was now drawing weapons: the Wasps with their cross-hilted shortswords and the Dragonflies with their punch-swords, whose blades jutted straight out from the knuckle-guard. She hesitantly laid a hand on her own weapon’s hilt.

‘Che?’ she heard Thalric address her, obviously noticing something in her face that worried him.

‘I’m…’ she began, but lacked the words to say just what she was. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, which turned out to be a gross exaggeration because – the slave Gjegevey leading the way, his own eyes proof against the darkness, and how she envied that now. In her dreams, these tombs had been visible by a curious grey half-light, devoid of colours, and she had wondered if that was how the Moth-kinden saw through their blank white eyes -

There was combat all around her. She heard a clatter of steel on steel, and the brief crack and sizzle of Wasp stingshot, the very sound of it striking fear into her stomach, but its wielder was standing right over her, defending her prone form.

‘Thalric?’ she called out.

‘Che, get up!’ he shouted down at her, as his hand spoke golden fire again. She heard a man scream, and a dying Dragonfly-kinden dropped to the deck before her eyes, a hole charred into his leather cuirass.

I’m with Wasps, fighting Dragonflies. The thought rattled through her mind. I was in Khanaphes…

No! I wasn’t in Khanaphes. That was the dream, but last night I didn’t catch any dreams. I let them go.

Thalric was crouching beside her, in a moment of stillness while the barge’s crew and Varmen continued fighting on every side.

‘Che, what’s wrong?’ the Wasp demanded.

‘Thalric… I don’t know. Help me.’

His face said eloquently that he had no possible way to do so.

‘The Empress…’ she started. And then The walls and floor of this place were slimy, so that each foot set down skidded slightly, then came up trailing threads of ooze. The lamp that Gjegevey had started for her set every surface glistening unhealthily.

They had been underground for long enough that Seda knew it would be dawn already above, but down here was a labyrinth of vast halls, lined with statues, every wall inscribed with the ancient glyphs of the Khanaphir. For hours they had walked, at first with the old Woodlouse choosing their path, and later with Seda herself taking the lead. By then she realized why they were finding nothing but empty chambers: the power here had been turning them aside.

‘Stop,’ she ordered the old Woodlouse.

‘We have been travelling for some, mm, considerable time,’ he admitted. ‘One might almost think that we were, ah, going round in circles.’

‘It is a test,’ she decided. ‘One I do not appreciate, but I shall pass it nonetheless.’

‘There is, hm, a great deal of, ah, latent power here,’ Gjegevey conjectured cautiously. ‘I would hesitate to…’

‘Yes, you would – and you would be wise to. I am of a different order, however. I am the Empress of the Wasps.’

‘I am not sure such titles will, ahm, mean a great deal to our hosts.’ The Woodlouse-kinden’s hollow eyes glittered in the lamplight.

‘Then I shall enlighten them,’ she replied pleasantly, and thrust a hand in the air as though grasping for something invisible.

The power awoke in her, digging its roots into the stonework of this place, then feeding, cannibalistic, on the ages of magic laid down here when the world was younger. She felt her blood stir and sing with all the borrowed life and youth she had taken into herself. In my dream she gained an audience with the lords of this place, and so shall I.

For a moment the monolithic grip of the place seemed immovable, and she was worried that she might not have enough reserves of strength within herself, for then her only option would be to seek the blood of another. And to lose Gjegevey would be a true tragedy, for he had been one of her very first supporters – since before she had even come to her throne.

But then she had hold of it and she twisted, with little finesse, but drawing upon that strength that she had been given, to make up for all that she had lost.

She felt the Masters of Khanaphes, sensed their slow minds come to a decision, and then they struck -

Che opened her eyes, expecting to find the fight still ongoing, but there was no sound of it. She was not even on the barge.

‘Ah…’ She hurt, but it was all inside. She bore no wounds.

At her faint sound, Thalric was kneeling again beside her. ‘Che!’

‘What’s happening?’

‘You tell me! You were… it was as though you were sleeping, but I couldn’t wake you.’

She sat up painfully, seeing that they were camped beside the canal: Thalric, Varmen, Skelling and his crew. The crew was two men short, she noticed. ‘We’re…’

‘Right up near the border, in so far as there’s a definite “border” at all,’ Thalric confirmed. ‘Che, what in the wastes happened to you?’

‘Thalric, she’s there.’

He opened his mouth to question her, but the pieces fell into place before he had to.

‘She’s seeking the Masters,’ Che told him urgently, as though there was something he could do about it. The world around her now seemed different, but then she realized that it was her senses that had changed. She had become charged with magic, connected to the world’s weave like a spider at the heart of its web, feeling the strands tug and twitch. Not only was she still aware of Seda as a dull and distant ache in her mind, but she felt that, if she could turn her mind just so, then she would be able to sense each and every magician, each ancient site of power across the hills of the Commonweal and beyond, even to the furthest horizon. Her mind remained locked inside her skull, but only just.

‘Thalric, I can…’

But an old, familiar taint had just touched the edge of her consciousness, snapping her back to the business at hand.

Is it… is it him…?

Pressing on Thalric’s shoulder for purchase, she stood up abruptly, staring wildly about. For a moment there she thought she had caught a glimpse of…

Tisamon…

Why is it so hard for me to remember what I came here for? Her quest to control her dreams, to know more about the magic that seemed to be engulfing her, that was secondary. She had come to save Tynisa from the spectre of her father. Only now did her roving mind fix on that task again – and only because she sensed the Mantis-kinden’s ghost ahead of them, for the very first time since inside the tombs of Khanaphes.

There was no mistaking the touch. She had carried that twisted presence in her mind for a long time, believing it to be the bitter shade of her lover, Achaeos. Only through the power of the Masters of Khanaphes had the truth come out – and by that time the creature was freed from her. Immediately, Tisamon had set off to find his daughter. In life he had been an intimidating man, a fierce killer whose life was hedged about by an untenably harsh code of conduct that had, in the end, left him no other goal but to seek his own death. Oh, he had been an honourable man, and loyal to a fault, but the spectre that Che had faced seemed to have been pared down, cut away until only that self-destructive slayer remained.